At present, client and market requires more and more capacity of the data communication products, such as ATM exchange, router etc. Architecture of the present ATM exchange, router etc. mainly includes circuit card, switched network card, and back plane connecting circuit card and switched network. Generally, it is a single framework structure. Accompanying with the increase of capacity, design of the products faces with the following technical problems:
a) When capacity is more than hundreds of Gbit, there are many circuit cards, such as POS interface circuit card, ATM interface circuit card and Giga-bit interface card etc. Power consumption of the whole machine is larger, it is difficult to implement them with only one framework. Especially when the capacity of the product is over 160 Gbit, with present technology, the technical problems of structure cannot be solved with a single framework, it must use multiple frameworks. With multiple frameworks, there are problems, such as interconnection between frameworks, main card and backup card switching etc., without successful design scheme.
b) Different market of data communication has different requirement of rated capacity. Therefore, the manufacturer is asked to provide series of products, such as 10 Gbit, 40 Gbit, 80 Gbit, 160 Gbit, 320 Gbit, 640 Gbit, 1.2 Tbit and several tens Tbit. At present, different series products provided by different manufacturers have different architectures. Although part of the manufacturers implement circuit card compatibility for one or two series in single framework, but the architecture needs to be changed. There is no successful solution with smooth capacity expansion for all series or from 40 Gbit to Tbit series.
c) As data communication develops rapidly, requirement of capacity will be larger and larger. When client purchases product of data communication, it is according to the requirement at that time. Period of time later, usually the capacity needs to be expanded. At present, when capacity expansion is needed, most of the manufacturers asks to purchase the new generation product which makes most of the old products could not be used again. In this case, the client needs to pay more investment for capacity expansion. Therefore, when capacity expansion, it is valuable to protect as much as possible the original investment of client. For product of data communication, investment of circuit cards occupies more then 60% of the hardware cost. Obviously, when system upgrade, circuit card compatibility will directly influence the client investment and expansion cost. According to the present technology, when capacity expansion, it is often solved by replacing the product, it means when capacity is difficult to satisfy requirement, expansion problem is solved by replacing less capacity product with larger capacity product. It directly conducts whole upgrade of client equipment and upgrade cost is expensive.